My interest in geology started when I was an artist in residence at Palmer Station, Antarctica. I took molds off the glacier ice and stone to make into glass sculpture. At the end of my stay, partly because it was so hard to capture ice texture, I molded the rock that had been left by retreating ice. When made into glass the rock has an ice-like quality. A small area of Rainbow Bridge is composed of Antarctic ice.
Most of the cast glass geologic patterns were taken from outcroppings in the hills behind Oakland. It’s the Monterey Formation of Northern California that is mainly composed of chert and shale. The chert was formed on the sea floor by the deaths of diatoms where their calcium-rich microscopic shells drift to the bottom where it gets compressed by years of material. Then that layer is subducted and baked in the process of plate tectonics over millions of years. Then that rock is thrust up in the continental collision, here, between the North American Plate and the Pacific Plate that causes earthquakes and mountain building here. The shale is also formed of sediments, but contain a measure of hydrocarbon. Locally, veins of coal have been discovered locally; in Monterey County the shale is fracked for gas. I want to call attention to this rock for its part in our changing environment: the evolution of our land and its exploitation for energy and the resulting climate effects.
Most interesting to me has been the way the chert fractures in road cuts where we have taken our texture molds. When transformed into glass, the prismatic surfaces beam light in every direction changing constantly in the daily and yearly light as the sun passes. You can watch time pass as the sun visibly traverses the sky. The time element has shown me layers of time: daily and yearly changes, the human scale of activity, making the road cut where we took the molds, mining glass materials, etc. Moving further into the past, the rock forming at ten thousand years per inch of chert, the upthrust of that material from sea floor to mountain top; the formation of our continent, world, solar system into the multi-billion-year geologic history of the universe.
Rainbow Bridge is on the site of an old General Electric facility that was remediated and re-built for contemporary use. The surrounding community is a rainbow of ethnicities, colors, cultures and languages, uniquely celebrated in Oakland, one of the most diverse communities in the country. I wanted my sculpture to be a bridge between the industrial past and the future community that thrives in this beautiful environment.
